I'm sitting in the OKC airport, about half an hour before my flight starts to board. It's been a good week, with many friends visited and too much rich food eaten. But then, the holidays are never the time to be too diet-conscious.

In years past, I've groused about the smokiness of this place, both in terms of my dad's house and just going to restaurants in general. Living in California has spoiled me on this point. But rather than bore what readers I have with a re-hash of an ongoing gripe, I think I'll look more inward this time...

At some deep level, I'm still very much a hick. Oh, I've tried very, very hard to get past it, but it is still there, lurking. On this trip, it surfaced within a day: Words like "nothing" and "running" became "nuthin'" and "runnin'". "You" became "Y'all". And I'm pretty certain that at least once, I said "figger" instead of "figure".

I've been teased by some friends as being something of an Anglophile, mainly because I try so hard to not sound like a backwoods type, that I sound like I'm pretentiously trying to sound English. And I can't really dispute that, since a lot of what I do is patterned after a teacher I had who was English. He sounded intelligent to me, and certainly very clear. So I chose to pattern my attempt at re-wiring my speech patterns after him. But a day or so back here, and all of that rolls back.

On Christmas Eve, my dad and I went over to my brother's house. We sat with them while my nieces opened their packages. At one point, my sister-in-law turned to me and said, "We must sound like a bunch of hicks to you." But not really, no. By that point, I'd been in town 3 days or so, and I wasn't noticing anything but the most exaggerated of accents. (There was another issue at play, but I'll come back to that.) Now, my brother has always had a really thick drawl, but that was even before I tried to change my speech. On a trip to Arizona once, a cousin of ours asked why he had an accent and I didn't. Of course I did (at the time), but sitting beside him I must have sounded like Laurence Olivier.

So there is the tie to Oklahoma that I will probably never lose. And if actors like Sean Connery are any indicator, my "native" accent will become more pronounced as I get older and older. But by then, I probably won't care as much.

But as long as I'm on the subject of hick-ism, I am going to rant at others besides myself. And this isn't anything to do with smoking, either.

Less than an hour after asking me if I thought they all sounded like hicks, my sister-in-law (and my brother a few minutes later) casually used a notable racial epithet in conversation (the so-very-controversial "N-word"). It was just there, as much a part of speech as me saying "hacker" to describe a co-worker. Earlier that day, my dad had been telling me a few stories about things that happened while he was in Vietnam (this is the first time he's ever really talked about it that much), and he also used that word, though he dropped to a near-whisper when he did. It would seem that he was at least a little bit concerned about someone being offended by it. But not my brother or his wife. That is, I don't think they were specifically hateful, just that it was so commonplace for them that it never occurred to either of them that I might be offended by hearing it, pasty white boy that I am.

Though I didn't say anything to either of them, that made them sound like hicks, more than the accents ever would or could. But things are still very conservative here in Oklahoma. This isn't to equate conservatism with racism, because I know that the two are not that directly linked. But there were a lot of things I noticed while out here; conversations overheard in restaurants about liberals selling out our freedoms, comments to the effect that we'll never be strong again until we bring Christianity and prayer back into schools. That sort of thing. I was uncomfortable a lot, and not ready or willing to voice my opinion in any of these cases.

Sadly-enough, I know that I contributed to the problems in my own small way by not standing up for what I felt to be right. But this was supposed to be a vacation, and that would have caused unnecessary trouble. It's not as if I really needed to be getting into fights with rednecks in diners. They'd probably have flattened me, anyway. But now I have to get over the feelings of guilt for not standing up for the principles I believe in. No winning option for me in this case.